INTERVIEW: Harriet Hyde – Black Moth

There has been somewhat of a revival of the vintage style in heavy metal in recent years. With a new wave of bands opting to export their brand of heavy music’s core sonic makeup, they hope to strike the chord that makes this style so damn enjoyable. Since 2010, Leeds based quintet BLACK MOTH have been fine-tuning their brand of hard hitting metal for some time now and the past several years has seen a surge in momentum for the band. This year sees the arrival of album number three, Anatomical Venus, and before a headlining show in Manchester (read our review here) to build anticipation for the record, we sat down with vocalist Harriet Hyde to lift the lid on their upcoming opus alongside talking about signing with Candlelight Records, their surging momentum and the changing attitudes towards women in our scene.

So we are on the third date of BLACK MOTH’s headlining UK tour. How has it been so far?

Harriet: Great! Yeah, it’s been really good fun, we’ve been dying to play some of this new material live for about a year now so it’s just so much fun to be able to play some of those songs live.

So in terms of the setlist, is it mostly new material?

Harriet: Mostly new but we still have a few of the old favourites! We’ve just been dying to play some of the new stuff really. The album itself won’t be out until the second of March so it is a bit of a funny one as people have only heard Moonbow and Sisters of the Stone, which are the two singles, but so far it is going down pretty well.

Moonbow was the single you released right at the end of 2017, how has the reception been for the single?

Harriet: Great, yeah really good! I’m really pleased with the video for that one as well. It was Ben Foley again, he did the video for Looner, and he just did it really strange and psychedelic for this one. So far, people seem to be really excited with what we are doing, the reason we chose Moonbow for the first single is because it is the one that most demonstrated Frederica‘s influence and what she brought to the band. She wasn’t on the last album, this is the first album that has had bits of her writing so it was a really good one to demonstrate what she brings and also thematically it is an ode to the moon so it is a nice opening theme to the album.

Since Frederica has joined BLACK MOTH has she had quite a big creative influence?

Harriet: Yeah absolutely. We’ve always written in that way where everybody gets involved in the writing process. When she joined she was quite clear that she didn’t just want to be a hired musician, she wanted to be part of the creative process.

Which is what you want as a band…

Harriet: Absolutely, that is what we are all about. If you are going to get a whole new member you want to benefit on what they may bring. She’s such a different musician so it instantly makes it a different prospect.

The record itself, Anatomical Venus, it has been quite a long time coming, about four years since your last one. Has BLACK MOTH developed a lot in that time?

Harriet: Is it four years? Or about three and a half? Yeah, so we recorded the album about a year and a half ago, but it has been a long time getting it out because we were changing record labels so there was all these legal bits and pieces we needed to go through. And then there was a delay at the pressing plant so yeah, that was part of it. I think also in that time you do a lot of growing and changing and I think the record is very different to our other stuff in some ways. The themes are more serious, it is a bit more evolved. Lyrically as well I collaborated with a poet, a friend of mine, on this album. On our previous stuff the lyrics are I guess kind of black comedy-esque and a bit tongue in cheek. This time, most of the lyrics are quite introspective and personal.

Was that always your intent? To write a more personal record?

Harriet: I think there is never a deliberate thing that happens. It’s much more a case of where we found ourselves. So I’m doing a psychotherapy training at the moment which forces you through a process of digging quite deep into yourself and exploring your shadow. So my mindset was very much in that so naturally that was the kind of things I was writing about. And then collaborating with Jess as well, it became much more personal. It wasn’t just a observational fun kind of thing, all the writing we were doing were about our own personal experiences.

I imagine that was quite a catharsis then for you?

Harriet: Yeah I think so. Certainly I think you can tell on the performances on the record, funnily enough Julia from GRAVE LINES who are touring with us at the moment, she’s a very close friend of mine. She listened to the record, I sent it her a few months ago, and she said to me “are you okay?” I was like “yeah why?” and she’s like “well, just listening to your performances on this record, they sound very very impassioned.” I was like wow okay, I was surprised that she could detect that but yeah, there is a lot of stuff being told on this album.

Anatomical Venus is going to be released on Candlelight Records which is such a influential and renown label. How does it feeling being part of their roster?

Harriet: Great! There are some bands on there that we are really big fans of and they’ve got a really rich history. They have further reach as well so I think that is a good thing for us as it’s going to be released internationally so there is going to be press in Europe and America, so the record is going to reach more people. I mean obviously via the internet it happens to some extent but now we are actually getting our music into the hands of people around the world so it feels like a step forward.

With BLACK MOTH it seems like in the last couple of years the momentum has really started surging forward. You’ve played at festivals like Download and Bloodstock for example, how does it feel to have this momentum where more people are talking about the band?

Harriet: It’s really nice to be back in it actually. We haven’t exactly churned out the albums particularly quickly so there is this sense of silence for a while and we weren’t gigging too heavily for the last year, 2017. So it is amazing to see that it has picked up again and that people are interested in what we are doing, it seems like people are excited to hear the new stuff. We’ve had a lot of coverage across all the press which is really nice, I can feel it picking up again. It’s a nice feeling, especially having waited so long after recording the record! To finally go “people can hear it!” It’s really nice.

It may seem like quite a vague and difficult question to answer, but what do you want to achieve with Anatomical Venus?

Harriet: For me, I can only answer this personally, I think my goal with this, as with anything, is to reach and connect with as many people as possible. There’s something really nice about connecting with people all over the world and if we get to travel a bit with it, that’s definitely a huge motive for me. So yeah, there’s always that thing of reaching more people and we’ve played some pretty amazing venues, always supporting other bands of course, it’s lovely playing different places. I think another thing for me is, more than ever, I feel I’m really taking my role as a woman in the rock and metal world more seriously. I think I’ve always avoided those questions in the past and going “oh god, why can’t they just treat me as a musician?” Increasingly, I’m thinking that is what I am, my experiences are filtered through being a woman but it has become more and more a motivation for me to try to, it sounds bloated, to readdress the balance and be a little bit of an inspiration to younger girls who might be thinking about joining a band. It is certainly better than what it was, but it is still massively baby steps, just look at the festival lineups. It still baffles me because I know so many incredible female musicians, most of my close female friends are musicians. Every single gig on this tour by the looks of things, obviously my close friend Julia is in GRAVE LINES who are supporting us, all the local supports have had girls in the band as well. It’s just great to see and the more that it is happening, the more girls that are coming to gigs will think that is something they can do rather than it just being a sausage party and a girl in a band being a anomaly, to the extent where female fronted becomes a genre because it is a rarity.

I absolutely hate that phrase, it’s not a genre at all…

Harriet: It’s a bit limiting isn’t it? It’s true that the female voice is a slightly different instrument I suppose, so it describes something but it’s not enough.

We have seen somewhat of a change in the attitude towards women in the rock and metal world. On the extreme side of things we have a band like VENOM PRISON for example break through and we’ve seen the recent Metal Hammer issue that celebrates women in our world. What more do you think needs to be done to level the balance?

Harriet: So I thought it was really great that TeamRock did that month of pushing women to the forefront. All the magazines on TeamRock, so Classic Rock, Prog and Metal Hammer, did issues that month and focused on women in music. I suppose if you think of it on one level you could think it is quite tokenistic to just have a month for women but I don’t see it like that, it was an opportunity to really focus on it. Anyone buying magazines that month will have actually got a sense of how many women are involved in this. If you have to over-represent a little bit to redress the balance at first, maybe that’s the case. Maybe they do need to be looking out there for more bands that have women in, not in a negative discrimination sense, people just saying things like “oh there just aren’t as many good bands of the standard to play the festivals” which is fair and nobody is saying a band who isn’t good enough shouldn’t be booked for these festivals but I think that is a load of rubbish. There are so many good bands if you look for them and the more women who see girls on stage doing it, the more likely they are to be inspired. For me, it was only though seeing bands like L7 occasionally in the music press when I was a teenager that really made me think maybe I can do this. But it wasn’t a common thing and Frederica says the same, in her high school she was the only girl she knew who was playing guitar. It’s a strange state of affairs but it’s changing for the better. I think the world itself needs to think a bit more about being a bit more accommodating for women in various different ways. That needs to be thought about a bit, the whole way it operates is still very geared up to the way men work rather than tuning in to women being a bit different in a way they operate. I’m not really sure how that would work at this point but it is definitely something that is going through my mind.

And really just to round up, the main focus this year for BLACK MOTH is the release of the album, but what else does 2018 have in store for BLACK MOTH?

Harriet: We’ve got Desertfest! We’re doing a big tattoo convention in Paris which looks really fun and we’re going to be doing more bits of touring and hopefully some festivals to be announced too. We’re probably going to release another single from the album, maybe another video as they are fun but yeah the focus is to get it out there!

Well thanks for your time Harriet, best of luck for tonight and the album’s release.

Harriet: Thank you very much.

Anatomical Venus is set for release on March 2nd via Candlelight Records.

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